Our friendship must have started before we were teenagers because one of my earliest memories of Edirees is of him and my brother teaching me to ride Edirees’s bicycle, one of those intermediate ones – mid size, freewheel, back-pedal brakes – and from which Edirees had already removed the training wheels. They let go, I fell and was angry with them for a long time. But bicycles would remain central to our friendship.

Intellectual giant. During the mid- to late-1990s, I learned a lot about post-Civil Rights politics in the USA from his pen. I was researching race and representation in the USA as I was developing an unhealthy obsession with early Spike Lee. This was post-1994, and so a lot of Marable’s analyses of the Civil Rights Movement, its victories and its massive shortfalls, were becoming apparent in the newly post-apartheid South Africa. Most specifically was his analysis of how organising along a politics of identity will only bring victories in representation. Without the actual transformation of institutions and society, it will only ever amount to representation without authority. Window dressing, in short.